There is a bear in the woods. Vladimir Putin is the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin. He has crushed dissent at home and wreaked havoc abroad, propping up a dictator in Syria, allegedly poisoning people in the UK and helping elect Donald Trump as the American president. No wonder he has been described as the most powerful man in the world.

Now Putin, judo black belt and former KGB agent, is to be portrayed on the Washington DC stage, just two miles from the White House. On 18 January, Kleptocracy, directed by Jackson Gay and penned by Kenneth Lin, a former writer on House of Cards, will receive its world premiere at the Arena Stage theatre.

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The play, written before the US election in 2016, is inspired by the power struggle between Putin and the wealthy oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is a crossroads in history when it was hoped Russia would embrace western liberal capitalism and become “more like us”. It did not quite work out that way. The play is also an undeniably timely exploration of US-Russia relations after the cold war.

The man who will play Putin is Christopher Geary, 30, previously seen in the Geffen Playhouse’s These Paper Bullets! Although the Russian president is parodied by a bare-chested Beck Bennett on Saturday Night Live, neither Geary nor Lin is aware of him having been portrayed in American theatre before.

“He’s utterly enigmatic and fascinating and very disciplined in some manners and then selfish and can be cruel,” Geary says. “But I think what I’m trying to focus on is I have to find the humanity in him because it does exist, and trying to find what he wants deep down is really essential.”

Putin is not the kind of person you would want to encounter on a dark night. To take one example, in 2007 he brought his big black pet labrador in to meet the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who looked distinctly uncomfortable – she has reportedly been fearful of dogs since one attacked her in 1995. But the Putin presented to Washington audiences will not be a pantomime villain.

Geary continues: “Putin goes home at night and goes to bed with thoughts and concerns, just like everybody else. So it’s that headspace that I’m more interested in. My job as an actor is to employ empathy, every character that I play. You hear in training: don’t judge your character, don’t judge your character. Empathy, I think, is one of the most powerful tools that an actor can use.”

Some of the Russian autocrat’s public posturing will be recreated on stage, but so will his mysterious interior life. “You do see flashes of his public persona but you also see a private Putin, moments where he is talking directly to the audience. While the public image of Vladimir Putin has been so crafted by him and other people, moments of him alone with his thoughts and worries are opportunities to find maybe idiosyncrasies that we don’t see in his interviews or in documentaries.”

A 1984 election campaign ad for Ronald Reagan began with the words “There is a bear in the woods”, interpreted by some as a reference to the Soviet threat. The new bear is Putin, identified by US intelligence agencies for interfering in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump and hurt his opponent Hillary Clinton. Special counsel Robert Mueller continues to investigate whether there was direct collusion with Trump, whose warm relationship with the Russian leader is an enduring puzzle.

Geary comments: “It’s timely right now. The timeline of the play is not current but I think you see what’s coming down the line, and you see seeds that are being sown and you see America as a character in the play. You see some deal making. Nobody’s innocent.”

Lin, an Asian American playwright whose works include Warrior Class, Po Boy Tango, Eric Carle’s Pancakes, Pancakes!, said Saïd and The Lynching of a White Man in Rural, CA, was commissioned to write the play in late 2015 by producer Robert Ahrens.

The 40-year-old, who has never been to Russia, observes: “Considering it looms so large in the American cultural consciousness coming out of the second world war and the cold war, it’s amazing how little Americans really know about Russia. Quite frankly, I’d heard the name Khodorkovsky but I didn’t really know much about him and did not realise his significance in the grand political landscape.

“I’m a person who wrote for House of Cards, and we had Russia storylines and we were definitely doing quite a bit of research into Putin. So I said: ‘Of course I’ll write this play for you, it’s very interesting, I’m not sure that people are going to want to see a Broadway play about Vladimir Putin.’” He laughs. “But the world has changed a lot since then.”

When Lin consulted Putin experts, their general advice was: “Don’t get too poetic with him, he’s not this grand figure, he is a bureaucrat.” But that hardly makes for good theatre. The playwright says: “He certainly doesn’t have that influence on the world so if you’re dramatising that character, since he is a public figure that looms so large, you’re not necessarily trying to create a facsimile of the man, you’re trying to create a facsimile of what he does to the world.

“There’s the danger of what might happen if he allowed this oligarch to become the most powerful and popular and wealthiest and beloved person in Russia. These are the things that Putin has to grapple with. He’s not only this kind of cipher that American media has presented him to be. He’s a person who has to grapple with very real problems of being the leader of Russia, and these are problems that are baked into Russia in a lot of ways because of what’s transpired before.”

This is also Khodorkovsky’s play. He was the richest and arguably most ruthless oligarch during the wild west capitalism that filled the Soviet vacuum. He owned the country’s biggest oil company, Yukos, and sought to open Russia’s markets to the world, only to find Putin blocking his path. Khodorkovsky spent a decade in prison on fraud and embezzlement charges that many analysts believe to have been politically motivated. He was released in 2013 after Putin pardoned him and since lived in exile in Switzerland and the UK.

Lin reflects: “It’s very much a story about an outsider. The fact that Khodorkovsky was Jewish in Russia is a very big deal. There were lots of constraints that were put on his life because of his heritage. For me, as a Chinese man living in America and feeling like the other and always on the hunt for opportunities to get into the cracks, to entrench myself, to root myself even more in this country, I really understood that character. Here we have the privatisation of a world superpower: this is the greatest opportunity any outsider can have to get inside.”

Khodorkovsky found himself in a struggle with Putin for the soul of Russia. “Khodorkovsky could have sold his oil company to an American oil company, and a Russian oil company would have been able to be traded on the stock exchange. Russia could have been opened up to the west as per what it seems like Khodorkovsky’s plans were. Who knows how things would have really happened. It’s a battle of wills for who’s going to win at the end and be the top dog, certainly, but also which direction is this country going to be taken in.”

Molly Smith, artistic director of Arena Stage, has described Kleptocracy, with its depiction of capitalist greed, corruption and chaos, as “the most dangerous play” it will mount this season. Lin asks: “When does capitalism turn into kleptocracy? When does democracy fall prey to manipulation? What is our greater impact on the world stage? I feel like a lot of those themes that we struggle with as Americans are the same themes that Russians are struggling with.”

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